On 2/20/08, Minh Lê Ngọc cumeo89@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with all of you. A WYSIWYG editor can not replace Wikitext. In some cases, wikitext is a programing language like Java and NetBeans can't program Java for Java programmers.
If wikitext is a programming language, god help us. It's supposed to be a simple, intuitive replacement for complex languages like HTML.
However, there 2 aspects of using MediaWiki: daily use (users may be novice, know little of Wikitext, edit simple pages) and template writing (experienced users write complicated code in templates for others to use). With the first one, WYSIWYG is a wonderful feature, with the second one, it's clumsy. So, a WYSIWYG editor should only cover some features of wikitext like: simple page representation, reference, template inclusion, extension call, page preview, categories, inter-wiki and leave others like: parser functions, magic variables, noinclude, includeonly, parameters...
Which is to say, that if there is a WYSIWYG editor, there should be a way of accessing the underlying XML directly.
Through this mailing-list, I see that we are struggling with Wikitext, which is a time-consuming work. What I suggest is, instead of wasting more time, we can change to XML, which is clearer, easy to parse, easy to understand and easy to extend.
Heh. Replacing the wikitext parser with a better wikitext parser is a pretty significant change. Replacing it with an XML parser...wow. You aim big.
I think realistically the problem is that open source works relatively well for language compilers. People can add features simply by extending syntax etc, and it works. However, who amongst us has the ability to really implement and maintain a high quality WYSIWYG editor? It's hard, really hard. And a WYSIWYG editor with editable syntax, now you're talking about a tool like frontpage, dreamweaver etc. This is not a task for a couple of full time developers and a bunch of hobbyists.
Steve